Day 369: One year since Al-Aqsa Flood

Over the past year, atrocities against Palestinian civilians have become normalized and are now occurring on a daily basis in Lebanon as Israel seeks to crush any and all forms of resistance to its regime of settler colonialism.

Armed by the United States, Israel has killed more than 41,000 people in Gaza and more than 2,000 in Lebanon, according to official figures, although estimates for what may be the actual numbers in Gaza range significantly higher.

Israel continues to massacre displaced Palestinians sheltering in schools and in tent encampments in northern and central Gaza, as co-host Nora Barrows-Friedman reported in the news segment at the beginning of this week’s livestream.

A replay of the entire livestream can be viewed in the video above, and the news segment can be viewed and read here.

In recent days, Israeli troops have laid siege to Jabaliya refugee camp for the third time since late last year, ordering residents south while surrounding the area with tanks and armored quadcopter drones.

“The north or heaven” is the attitude of many Palestinians in the north who refuse to heed Israel’s forced displacement orders.

It is feared that Israel may be implementing the so-called Generals’ Plan – a scheme to empty northern Gaza of its remaining population of some 300,000 Palestinians who have endured months of bombing, hunger and thirst.

As winter approaches, with nearly all of Gaza’s population displaced from their homes and deprived of life’s necessities for months on end, these may prove the most deadly days and weeks of the genocide.

But neither the people of Palestine or Lebanon have forsaken resistance, despite Israel using just about everything in its arsenal to break that support – with the full and unconditional backing of its Western allies, principally the United States.

“Expulsion or murder”

This week, The Electronic Intifada was joined by Joseph Massad to better understand the structural and historical context for the scale of Israel’s crimes and the extent to which they are supported by the West.

Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University and one of the most significant public intellectuals today. He writes a regular column for Middle East Eye, providing essential historical context and perspective on contemporary events.

The author of several books – including Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and The Palestinian Question and Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan – Massad is currently working on a major history of settler-colonialism.

The horrific scale of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people may be shocking, but is not surprising, Massad told Barrows-Friedman and co-host Ali Abunimah.

Committing atrocities has been part of Israel’s very existence ever since it was established in 1948, with the aim of emptying the land of its Palestinian inhabitants “either through expulsion or murder,” Massad explained.

The genocidal declarations from Israeli leaders following Hamas’ devastating surprise attack on 7 October 2023 “were clearly made as targeting the Palestinian people as a whole, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and Lebanon, in addition to targeting the Lebanese people,” Massad said.

The defeat of its military’s southern command at the hands of the Palestinian resistance last October threatened Israel’s image as an invulnerable military superpower and “its standing as policeman of the region at the behest of the US and Western European countries,” he added.

Through its genocide, Israel believes that it is teaching Palestinians to “never resist them again.”

Massad is not surprised by the Western tolerance and support for the devastation and violence wrought by Israel in Gaza and increasingly in Lebanon, describing Israel as an extension of Western imperial rule in the region.

The West is no stranger to genocidal wars, with the US continuing to defend its use of atomic bombs to deliberately kill some 215,000 people in Japan at the end of World War II. Likewise, France has never “apologized for the genocide they committed in Algeria when they killed upwards of a million people and colonized the country for over 132 years,” Massad explained.

“I believe Israel is sincere when it says it indeed abides by Western liberal values, one of which is genocide, one of which is settler colonialism, one of which is utter racism and racial contempt for racial inferiors,” he added.

Existential war

The current war is existential for Palestinians as well as Israelis, according to Massad.

For Palestinians, the Israeli tactic of postponing a resolution to the colonial situation in Palestine has served to fully erase their struggle and cement the status quo of indefinite unfreedom.

“The Israelis have always portrayed every situation they find themselves in as an existential one,” Massad said. “And perhaps they’re not wrong.”

He explained that if the state was founded on ethnic cleansing and maintained through apartheid and aggression, “then any form of resistance to Israel and any of these Israeli practices is seen correctly as an existential war.”

And the war has become existential for Israel in another way, in that “the entire world now realizes that this is a genocidal country” and it finds itself increasingly isolated and treated as a pariah.

But Western countries “will continue to support it because, first of all, it is an important imperial station for them” and was established “for that purpose,” Massad said.

If Israel “were no longer able to fulfill its mission, to fulfill the services that it has fulfilled for the West, only then would the price of supporting it become too high for the Europeans and the Americans,” he added.

Western powers have helped Israel maintain its colonial rule in Palestine in a post-colonial age “by claiming that anyone who resists them is resisting the rights of Jews, rather than the rights of colonists,” Massad explained.

This has been “strong propaganda that has been quite persuasive to many.”

Massad said that from the very start, claims of anti-Semitism have been used “precisely as an ideological cover for Zionism and Jewish settler colonialism in Palestine and to prevent Palestinians from ever achieving legitimacy in resisting Jewish colonialism, which must always be framed as anti-Semitism.”

Meanwhile, it is Israel that “claims that it has to commit all the atrocities and war crimes … in the name of defending the Jewish people. … It is Israel’s anti-Semitic claim that it commits these crimes in the name of Jews that has to be challenged.”

During the wide-ranging interview, Massad also put the crackdown on campus speech in support for Palestinians and against genocide in the context of a decades-long process to erode academic freedom in the service of capital and empire at US universities. This began as a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and accelerated after the 11 September 2001 attacks, he said.

Western commitment to genocide

Meanwhile, neither the Democratic or Republican parties in the US have “any respect for international institutions or legality,” Massad said.

“What we are seeing is that both parties are bringing the world increasingly closer to a global conflagration,” he added.

“The commitment of the US and its Western allies to a larger regional war with Israel could bring down the international economy,” Massad said. “They’re proving … how much farther they will go in defending Western civilization, commitment to genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism.”

He also poked holes in the thesis that the Israel lobby is pulling the strings in Washington at the expense of the US taxpayer.

“As an American taxpayer … you spend a lot more money on all the American bases that exist in the Middle East than on Israel,” Massad explained.

“Israel fights some of these wars at the behest of the US, and it is Israeli soldiers who may be killed in such wars, rather than American soldiers – an extra benefit for the US.”

And Israeli soldiers are being killed and injured in both Gaza and Lebanon, where resistance groups are still able to fire rockets reaching Tel Aviv.

In addition to the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, “the Yemenis, the Iraqis and the Lebanese all fired on Tel Aviv this week,” contributing editor Jon Elmer said during his weekly battlefield report.

Elmer’s report also included analysis of a complex ambush in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, and the defense of Jabaliya refugee camp in the north.

Finally, The Electronic Intifada editors marked the one-year anniversary of the livestream by replaying an emotional interview with Dr. Refaat Alareer, the beloved writer and professor and very first guest of the livestream who was murdered by Israel in a targeted strike in Gaza City less than two months later.

Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program and this writer and Asa Winstanley contributed writing and production. Michael Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.

Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.